A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  “What have you found out about Suzman?” whispered Lettie, when he had settled down at her table in the Saloon Bar. “Have you found out what was behind this Weekend?”

  “I can’t tell you what we’ve found out about Suzman,” Charlie replied, his voice equally low. “But I think I can say we still don’t know what was behind the Sneddon Fellowship.”

  “I’ve been to see my mother again,” Lettie said. “She’s beginning to get very crabby and complains that I’m asking questions about the Sneddons the whole time. All she wants to talk about is her hard life. I can’t think of a subject I’m less interested in. I don’t think I’ll be going again, unless you have something specific you want me to get from her. She asked me last time when I was coming back here to live. Next time she’ll be assuming I’ll have her to live with me!”

  Back in his bed and breakfast place, where he parried questions with the assurance that they could have a good chat over breakfast, Charlie bathed, set out his things, then walked around the room thinking over his day. Then in his little notebook he made the entry: “needed little sleep.” After a pause for thought he added another one: “copyright?”

  Then he turned on his bedside light, got into bed, and settled down to read the letters of Susannah Sneddon.

  Chapter 16

  Letters

  The letters spanned thirteen years. They were reasonably regular—every three or four months—and were meticulously dated. The sergeant at the Ilkley police station had helpfully put them into chronological order. They were beautifully written, and the early ones showed a self-consciousness of style such as many fledgling authors display. Susannah Sneddon was trying her wings as a writer:

  “Now, with the coming of Spring, I feel the earth tremulously stirring into life, with tiny blades and shoots of hope and promise bravely piercing the soil, even here in exposed, windswept Micklewike. Yet the other day I was walking past the open door of the barn and I heard the wind sweeping up the dead leaves inside and dashing them against the walls, so that the whole building seemed alive, the leaves resuscitated in a monstrous dance of death. When I think of our nation, slowly returning to life after the four dreadful years of slaughter, I see that same mingling of the dead and the living, see the timid shoots of new life peering up from the graves of our dead sons . . .”

  That was in 1919, when the series of letters began. Charlie frowned a little at the tone: she was very hot on natural observation, was our Susannah. She wrote about hawthorn and bluebells as if they were never to be seen in distant Ilkley: “I know how you too once felt the rhythms of the seasons, the tug of Spring and the sated relaxation of Autumn,” she wrote to her friend at one stage. There seemed to be an undertone of pity, even of contempt, for the friend who had left Micklewike to marry an urban grocer.

  Quite early on there were hints of her ambitions: “Oh, if only I could give shape to my feelings—give them form, find characters who could experience them, embody them.” And later:

  “Joshua is writing; strange, disordered stuff, sitting at his old table in snatched moments in the evenings. He does not talk about it, but I read it when I am alone in the day, and do not understand it. That is not the sort of writing that I crave to do, but then I do not have the experience of having been in the trenches. He does not talk about that either, but I know that it is with him every hour of the day, haunting him.”

  And then, in the summer of 1920, it became explicit: “I am writing a novel!”

  With experience of her writing and style it became easy for Charlie to skip the passages of fine writing. There was a mixture of self-indulgence and showing-off about them that he found distasteful. In any case they became less frequent as Susannah had her fiction into which to channel them. More interesting to him were the glimpses of life at High Maddox Farm, and the progress of the pair’s careers as writers:

  “My novel has been accepted! Carter and Foreman have taken it, and think it will do modestly well! I am to get money for it, what they call an advance! The delight of this is beyond anything I can describe—it warms my whole body, gives dance to every step I take.

  “Picture us, if you will, of an evening, Joshua at his little table, I at mine, two pools of light in the darkening room, he penning the tormented gaieties of his strange novel, I trying to encompass the dark feel of the earth, the heartstopping joy of the thrust of Spring. Yes, I am writing a second novel—how could I not, in the drunken enthusiasm of being now a soon-to-be-published writer? The first is called Orchard’s End, and the new one Between the Furrows. Oh, the joy, Janet, of being a writer! Nothing will touch me now—not our poverty, our hunger, the hardness of our lives. And perhaps it will not be so hard for us in future. They are paying me fifty pounds!!!!”

  Inevitably Charlie was interested in the woman’s love-affair, if such there had been. There was an early reference to “Hugh.” Susannah was talking about her hatred of “the everyday—of cooking and cleaning, washing and mending, shopping and gossiping,” and she added: “perhaps if things had been different with Hugh I would go about them contentedly. But perhaps not.” That last sentence suggested to Charlie a welcome douche of realism and self-knowledge.

  Then much later, at the time she was writing The Barren Fields and was having trouble over “a very passionate scene,” she confessed: “if only Hugh and I had been more to each other, if there had been something beyond yearning looks and fleeting touches, for what we had was a love that could never put itself into words.” That seemed odd and ambiguous to Charlie: he began to wonder not only if the affair had been completely chaste—that had always been a possibility—but if it had been more in Susannah’s imagination than a thing of the real world: yearning looks and fleeting touches are very easy to imagine. Then he considered another possibility: Susannah was after all a novelist, and could be trying to convey a totally false impression to her friend. In 1930 she wrote: “Hugh’s wife died last week. I felt nothing, nothing at all. That was another era, another life, it happened to another person. I am a writer. I live in my books.” The words put Charlie uncomfortably in mind of Rupert Coggenhoe.

  Joshua was much more frequently mentioned than the shadowy Hugh. At one point she said: “They despise him in the village because he is a poor farmer, who has ambitions beyond the everyday. They have no mercy, no vision: they cannot see that the sordid business of scraping a wretched living clings like sticky mud, prevents the soul soaring.” When his first book—she said she couldn’t think of them as novels, because there was no story, hardly any characters you could identify as such—was published, to universal apathy, she recorded him as smiling grimly, and then going about his farm work as usual.

  Work was really what clung to Joshua in these letters: ploughing, hoeing, feeding, sowing, harvesting—the mentions of this round of farm activities were off-hand, but somehow there came through a feeling of unremitting, back-breaking toil, such as the modern world hardly knows. And then, in the evenings, often into the night, there he was at his little table, lit at first by gas lamp, only later by electricity, struggling at those books that nobody wanted to read. From the letters he did not get the impression that Joshua was of the “every sentence is a torture” school of writers, but rather that he wrote and discarded, rewrote and rediscarded. And when further books came out, to further apathy, there were further grim smiles. The most Susannah recorded him as saying was “Maybe their time will come.”

  He certainly read Susannah’s novels. There was a moment of comedy when “Cousin George from over Abbothall way” paid them a visit to protest about Susannah writing “mucky stories,” and claimed that she was bringing the Sneddon name into disrepute. Joshua stood up for his sister, and said that any farmer who couldn’t stand a bit of copulation shouldn’t be in the livestock business. Cousin George’s stock in trades were business efficiency allied with narrow religion. His great delight seemed to be in coming over to give Joshua good advice of the “they turnips will never thrive” kind. Charlie remembered a ch
aracter in The Black Byre of that type: a mean-spirited and grasping petty tyrant. He rather suspected he was here meeting the original of that character. Joshua, at any rate, took little notice of him. “That’ll give Cousin George something to rail about,” he would say, in the wake of any minor farm disaster. All disasters seemed to rouse in him the stoicism of one who had known life in the trenches of the First World War, one to whom nothing worse could happen. But his generosity had not been killed with his hope. When Susannah recorded herself reading to him one of her hotter scenes, his reaction was similar to that to his farming setbacks: “That’ll make Cousin George sweat!”

  It was clear enough from the letters that Joshua was a poor and a reluctant farmer, and that the money from Susannah’s books came in very welcome for the household from time to time. Not that she poured it into the farm, or handed it over to Joshua in the way some Victorian literary ladies are said to have handed their earnings over to their husbands. But there were references in the letters to Susannah handing over money on occasion to Joshua for specific agricultural purposes—the purchase of seed, or of new implements. “This is my home, my land,” she wrote to her friend. “If I must pay to keep it, I will pay.” She made no references to Joshua’s jealousy of her success, but she did record that he did not like her books greatly. “Life’s not like that,” he said when he had read The Barren Fields. “It doesn’t progress, go forwards, have beginnings and endings. It just jolts along messily.” There spoke once more, perhaps, the man of the trenches.

  Susannah said little to her friend about money. She might casually mention advances—one hundred pounds, apparently, for The Barren Fields and fifty more for the novels which succeeded it. They seemed to earn their advances and more, because twice a year there were mentions of royalties (“those are the monies which the books have earned, Janet dear”), and occasionally the expression of pleasure at the size of the cheque: “Very happy with my royalties, pleased with my publishers. There is talk of a cheap edition.” But what really intoxicated her was the joy of writing, of being published, from time to time of getting letters from her readers: “To give pleasure is to have a feeling of great power—and great joy!”

  Susannah recorded in many of her letters the walks she took while planning a new chapter: the views over the Yorkshire countryside, the farmyard sights and smells, the creatures in the hedgerows. And then: “to sit down, gratefully, and for the words to flow, the people to come alive, the landscape to glow and shimmer on paper.” Then she was in a world of her own, and Charlie could well imagine that she hated interruptions: “This morning I was deep in the complexities of a first chapter when Mrs Blatchley arrived with her dough-faced daughter. I had forgotten it was Thursday, her day. The chapter shattered—fell apart around me. Tomorrow I must take a long, long walk to try to put it together again.”

  She was very conscious that she had the day to write in, whereas her brother had only snatched moments at night. When they acquired a wireless set in 1931 she said she was careful never to switch it on when he was working. She was rather contemptuous of it anyway: “such a poor alternative to peace and quiet.”

  All this time Susannah and Joshua were in and of Micklewike: not loved by the villagers, nor loving them, but constantly there, utterly rooted, in a grudging way accepted. In all the years before 1930 covered by the letters Charlie found reference only to one visit to Ilkley to see her friend, when she came home the same evening, and one to Leeds for dental work that could not be done closer to home. She had hated the place. “The traffic and the noise, and the smells and the constant bustle and barging of the people—everything combined to give me my sharpest anticipation yet of Hell itself!” She had gone straight from the station to the dental surgeon, then straight back to the station. She had used the comparative wealth from the books to pay: “Ten pounds! But the joy of being no longer distracted from work by a dull ache in the mouth makes it worthwhile.”

  Then in 1930 she was asked down to London by her publishers. As far as Charlie could see from the letters this was an act of pure kindness on their part. Susannah mentioned to her friend no good business reason for the trip, only that Walter Allemby at Carter and Foreman would like to meet her, having published her with the anticipated modest success and a bit more for several years. He suggested that they book her into a hotel overnight, and that next day she could come to the firm’s offices, meet people in charge of the various aspects of publishing, then have lunch and be put on the afternoon train back to Leeds. After some hesitation Susannah agreed. She wrote to her friend that she anticipated no pleasure from the trip, but said that Mr Allemby had always been so kind and helpful that she thought it right to accede to his desire for a meeting. She went down into Batley Bridge to buy a new dress.

  The next letter showed that she had been right in anticipating little pleasure. On the long (four hours—who said the railways were better then?) train journey from Leeds to London she was interested in the scenery she passed through, but she thought it “flat and wet,” and felt that it was a worthless experience to see nature at such a high speed. Carter and Foreman had booked her into the Great Northern Hotel at King’s Cross. Arriving there in the late afternoon she apparently spent the rest of the day skulking in her room, or scuttling to the bathroom and lavatory when the corridors were clear. She seemed absurdly conscious that the hotel staff were laughing at her as a country bumpkin, though of all hotels a railway one must have been most used to a heterogeneous clientele. Susannah seemed to have an infinite capacity to go without food, and she ate neither dinner nor breakfast.

  The offices of Carter and Foreman were near Covent Garden, and as the Piccadilly line went there directly from King’s Cross Mr Allemby had suggested she take the Underground. The suggestion was certainly well-meant, but unfortunate. Susannah got her ticket, and then was confronted by the recently installed escalator. Too flurried to realize that there were also conventional steps she stood at the top, jostled by the other passengers, trying to summon up the courage to step on to it. When someone swore at her for getting in his way she turned and fled—“out into the hideous roar of traffic, more awful than even I could have contemplated, and into the comparative safety of a taxi.”

  When she arrived at the offices of Carter and Foreman things began to go better.

  “Mr Allemby was very kind, as I knew he must be. If he noticed that I was flurried he made no comment. He must have registered my provincial appearance, my shabby shoes, my lack of ‘face paint’, but he never let his eye rest on my deficiencies. He is, after all, a gentleman. His secretary brought us tea and biscuits in his office—most welcome!—and we talked about how well the cheap edition of The Barren Fields is doing. To be bought and read by so many ordinary people, people like myself, is a great pleasure. Then the talk ranged around a little—the progress of the new novel, even such restful, uncontroversial topics as punctuation (once my downfall, though no longer). All was calming and peaceful, apart from the dreadful roar of motor vehicles outside, and the calls of the market men. When he thought I was sufficiently refreshed, Mr Allemby took me to the office of Mr Carter, son of the founder of the firm, who was gentle, unworldly and most kind. It was clear that he had read and enjoyed my books!! I had thought that the head of the firm would be a businessman purely, but he was not so: he discussed the books in detail, and told me his preferences. But this was true of all the firm’s members to whom I was introduced. They were happy to speak of my books, and all expressed the pleasure they got from them. One of them asked if it took all day to come from Micklewike to Leeds! Another asked if I had access to a telephone in my home village.

  Then came the moment I was dreading: lunch. I was to be accompanied by Mr Allemby, Mr Carter and Miss Murchison, who is an accountant, and the only woman in the firm. Mr Allemby said they had thought I would prefer somewhere quiet. (I am sure he meant somewhere not fashionable, somewhere where I would not look too out of place!) I nodded dumbly. It was a five-minute walk—I was almos
t too terrified to cross the road, but Mr Allemby took my arm and guided me though the madly careering motor cars and omnibuses. The restaurant was very grand to my eyes (a great deal of plush and gilt), but probably very ordinary to theirs. When I found that the menu was a conventional English one I was so relieved I looked at Mr Allemby gratefully, and he smiled and nodded. I was able to order leek and potato soup, with steak and oyster pie to follow, without any feeling that I would make a fool of myself by not knowing the correct way to eat them.

  They tried—for they are all kind people—to make me feel more at home than I really could. I told them shyly that this was the first time in my life I had been to a restaurant. They pressed me that this could not be the truth, but I insisted on it: that I had been twice in a café—once with you, Janet dear!—but never before in a restaurant. To take my mind off my uncertainties they encouraged me to talk about my writing. I tried to tell them of the joy I had in it: not just in creating, but in the lovely business of writing itself. Mr Allemby told me, rather hesitantly, perhaps fearful of offending, that I am now the last of their authors to submit handwritten manuscripts.”

  Charlie, in danger of falling asleep, jerked himself awake. Surely no one at that date would do that? But there it was:

  “. . . the last of their authors to submit handwritten manuscripts. Mr Allemby complimented me on my beautiful handwriting, and I said I had been very well taught. (Remember Miss Cross—Crosspatch!—and all those rapped knuckles for slovenly penmanship?) Miss Murchison said she had been talking to the firm’s printers on the telephone only that day, and the gentleman there said he actually preferred my handwritten manuscripts to many that were done with the typewriter. He said they were ‘so beautifully legible’—as great a tribute as Crosspatch can ever have had! I refrained from any sweet course . . .”